If You Want to Earn $1,000 Per Month on Medium — Work Backwards

Why starting with the end-goal will help your daily writing

I’m not a top-earner on Medium, but I do well. While my recent curation “jail” ban has taken half my earnings, I continue to earn at least $1,000 a month from non-curated stories.

This is my monthly goal.

I didn’t just decide to earn that and wait until the end of the month. I take the whole number and work backwards. This means I need to pull $33 a day from all my stories to hit the number.

With the new Partner Program, we get real-time read income, month-to-date, up to the day before.

I can see where I need to step it up if I’m behind.

I can see, real-time, what stories work and which aren’t.

I write more of the stories my readers want to read and fewer of the stories they don’t.

The process sounds stupid when I write it, but as writers, why are most of us here? To earn money from our craft. In order to earn money from our Medium stories we need readers to read them.

When we write stories readers want to read, we get paid more.

So… I work backwards.

I have this daily goal of at least $33. This means I publish almost daily. Most days I publish more than once.

Since my new stories won’t get curated, I have to produce a fresh stream of content on a regular basis. Non-curated stories don’t live long — maybe a week, unless you push them hard with links in your latest content.

Yes, it’s a bit of a writing hamster wheel, but for me, it’s worth the effort.

I’m building a very valuable tribe of readers on the back-end. This is worth much-more than $1,000 per month to me. In fact, even if my Medium income went all the way down to zero, the long-game benefits of lead-generation that Medium provides, far outweigh any setback in short-term income.

For now, if my previous day’s earnings aren’t on track, I write harder the next day. No, I can’t double my income using this strategy, but a small tweak in daily effort can keep me on my $1k/month track.

Maybe I need to post three stories to get back on track, instead of one.

In aggregate, this daily method, coupled with being active on Medium (to grow followers), is the path I follow to earn (at least) a grand a month.

How to find what readers want to read

Start with your own stats. This is your stronger barometer of what stories rock your readers and which stories they’ll ignore.

Those pet projects you just had to write — most of those, we don’t understand and won’t read. I’ve had plenty of those myself. They never pull an audience. Just because a story idea blew wind up your shorts doesn’t mean your readers will feel the breeze.

Look at the Medium homepage.

Check the top stories of all time.

Uncover the types of stories your tribe enjoys. These are the people you serve. This is your job. Write them more of the stuff they’ve already proven to enjoy.

I use a niche story strategy.

Everything I write is laser-focused to serve the people I want in my tribe — writers and creators who want to make work that sells and sell more of their work once it’s made.

When all your content targets a particular person, after 10–15 stories, she’ll start listening. Maybe she’ll join your email list after 20 stories.

If we want to earn our reader’s attention we’ve got to play the long-game.

There are 30,000+ active Medium writers. This is your competition for attention. When you own your niche, you carve a little corner of the platform for yourself. This strategy gets you noticed in a sea of writers, all scraping the bottom for attention, writing any story that comes to mind.

When you own your niche you grow your tribe.

Build your tribe today

As I mentioned, the monthly income is extra cake, but not the main focus of my efforts here. I use Medium to build my own list.

Medium get thousands of hours in free labor from me. My writing helps pay their salaries, whether my stories earn me money or not. When a platform benefits from the free labor of others, we don’t owe the platform anything beyond following the rules they publish.

Medium allows us to add lead-capture links to the bottom of our stories.

I chose to take a more-direct approach to lead-capture, which resulted in a permanent curation ban (even if I publish on a different publication). But the list-building benefits I get in return, far-surpass the pennies I’ve lost.

So, I keep doing what I’m doing.

The tribe you own is the single, most-important insurance policy you can have in your publishing business. As we know, Medium can take away our income overnight, with no recourse on our part.

If you want to control your financial destiny you need a list too.

I’ve got a free email masterclass for you.

Guarantee your seat today. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 (or your next 1,000) readers without spending a hot nickel on ads. Tap the link. Enroll in the Tribe 1K today.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.